Hey thanks for checking in and thinking of us! Have a gif!

Unfortunately I can't come back with any news about the Switch but it's definitely something that's been in the backs of our minds for awhile now and we're still planning on looking into it.
Right now our focus is getting the game to a point where complete strangers can run through a full gameplay loop with no confusion or questions and no prompts from us. We're almost there but we really want it solid.

We also recently showed the game at a few festivals/cons and got a really nice review that you can check out here:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/muddledash-preview-race-octopus-party-10149215#ICID=sharebar_twitter

Gotta apologise for the total lack of updates over here too, we've gone a little silent on all fronts lately as development as been slowed by general life stuff (Cop out excuse, I know) but we'll work through it!

Super into the loose sketch artstyle you've got going on here. Very fun!

Phew!
Home today after an insane 4 days in Melbourne. Missing it already but at the same time, glad to be back filled with inspiration, motivation and new ideas.
I'll be treating this post as more of a diary of my time there so if you're interested in the perspective of a new developer being totally in awe of the gaming community and the vibe surrounding it please read on!

I'll start off by back tracking a little bit. About a month ago while browsing through Facebook I saw a post from one of the organisers of GCAP offering a chance for new developers to apply for something called GCAP Assist. The program basically allowed successful applicants to attend the event free of charge. I applied and immediately started scouting out other events in my area, optimistically hoping that if successful I should at least have some experience showing the game to people.

Sydney has an event every month called Beer and Pixels where local developers bring their games to a bar in the CBD and show off what they've been working on. If you've read our devlog before you'll know that I'm a big fan of this event, it's a great place to meet local developers and get a new perspective on your game. Niall and I have been working hard to get a demo build ready that we can leave alone and let people play without any explanation. From the start we've wanted our core gameplay loop to be something that people can jump right into and start playing without confusion, it is afterall meant to be a party game that anyone can play and the new build went really well!

Props to these guys for yelling so loudly that security started eyeing us off

If you're not participating in your local game dev scene you should be! Playtesting in places like this is absolutely invaluable. While nothing totally game breaking, the amount of new bugs and issues I saw with the game while watching people play was staggering. People were exploring the mechanics and levels in ways I never would have thought of and without showing the game these bugs might have gone completely unnoticed.

So, a few bug fixes and re-worked rooms later and I was showing the game at AIE's game day. Another Sydney based event at a game development college.

Brought the whole set up this time

After these events I felt so much better about taking our game to a conference like GCAP. The improvements made just by showing the game and gaining that new perspective boosted my confidence a lot. It was also nearing Halloween at this point so I carved a mini podepumkin.

Spooky

Soon after this I got confirmation that I had been successful in my application to GCAP Assist and I was off to Melbourne! I arrived with the new build on my laptop on the Monday morning and headed down to the conference hall so that I had an idea of where I had to go the next day. I had somehow completely missed the memo that Unite Con was on that day, the conference hall was packed! I decided, at the risk of getting kicked out, to set up Muddledash.

The beginning of my rogue marketing strategy

Thankfully everyone was really cool with me setting up like this, it looked absolutely hilarious in comparison to everyone elses set ups. A lot of people there were showing what they had brought for PAX AUS so their tables looked amazing.

That night there was an after party in a pub across from the conference hall, the vaporwave was blasting and I had an awesome time catching up with some devs from the Sydney scene and talking to a bunch of new people. Massive shout outs to Thom Wheeler, Julian Wilton and the guys behind Party Golf. You guys are awesome.

The next day was the start of GCAP and wow. I thought Unite was big, GCAP was crazy.

Technically this was the closing keynote but I am bad at remembering to take photos

It was another huge day of setting up Muddledash, running in and out of some great talks and meeting a bunch of new people. By this stage I was starting to get a bit of a reputation as the guy who was setting up his game everywhere. I was super surprised that no one else was doing this. There were empty tables everywhere and great opportunities to show the game to really influential people. A lot of people came up to me purely because I was there and no one else was. If I can give one piece of advice to anyone who is new to the scene, do not be afraid to show what you have made! Everyone in the community is super nice and supportive and the worst case scenario is that a bunch of new people now know your game exists.

The afterparty was another big networking event that was super enjoyable. I got talking to Laura Dale who had been flown out to Melbourne by the Victorian Government to write articles about Australian games. I saw another opportunity here and asked if she wanted to play a round of Muddledash right there in the bar and out of that we got our first bit of press about the game! You can read it here!

I also had a great talk with Rami Ismail about commiting to the game you are creating and believing in your ideas. That man is a saint!

The next day was a lot of the same insanity and honestly from there it is all a bit of a blur. The excitment of feeling like I am living out a dream I have had since I was 8 has totally blown me away and I'm not quite back to baseline yet.

An image of me being carted back to the airport

Anyways, congratulations to all the winners from the awards night and thanks to the organisers of the events. The last few days have been amazing and I can't wait to get to work.
Keep an eye on this thread, there's a lot of stuff coming.

Hey everyone! Quick update here with a few little gifs to keep it interesting.
I'm bringing Muddledash to Melbourne International Games Week from Monday-Thursday and would love for as many people to play it there as possible! Unfortunately we were unable to organise any specific place to show the game so I'll be wandering around GCAP and all over the CBD doing some guerrilla playtesting.
If anyone wants to meet up and hang shoot me a message, would love to meet some peeps.

Anyways, gifs were promised so here's a little look at the re-working I've been doing on up room corner cases. Trying to get a nice flow to them.

In celebration of World Octopus Day please enjoy a lovely assortment of delectable gifs.

I'd also like to mention that Muddledash will be shown at AIE GameDay this coming Friday, and I'll be attending GCAP for the full 3 days (Oct 31 - Nov 2), would love to see some of you guys there if you're in Sydney/Melbourne!

Getting into the nitty gritty stuff before we show the game at AIE's Game Day. Bug finding and UI work a plenty!
Here's some graphics I drew today to be coloured with Niall's magic paintbrush code so I don't have to repeat my very well rehearsed explanation of the controls to new players:

If you guys know of any other gamepad layouts I should account for please let me know, these are the only two I've seen around but I want to try to cover everything!

Not too much to say about development lately. Been getting into a lot of room design so I thought I'd show one of my favourites from my recent session:

I'll be doing a room drawover stream on Tuesday night about 5pm AEST if anyone's interested. Be prepared to see one of the worst workflows you could imagine. I know it's bad.

Hey guys! Thought I might try out some live streaming of level design, would appreciate the company!
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tFRkxjcWpuN

edit* Short stream today, just seeing how it all worked out. Will be doing more of these in the future so stay tuned.

@ Capntastic, you're definitely invited to the party
@Nathy, thanks so much! So happy Niall was able to get the game running smoothly enough to record gameplay on our rubbish machines. It was definitely a worry haha.

Well, I'm gonna do a pretty text heavy post this time, so if you're only here for gifs and pictures our website is filled with a bunch of them, please stop in!

So first up, as Niall mentioned he has now left Australia, leaving me to fend these dingos off all myself. It was a wild ride working on a game together in person after so many years only knowing each other as online entities.
We're both really happy with where we've taken this game so far and are excited to take on a new phase of development and make this game something really special.

Some big changes were made to the game right before Niall left, most notable of which is the addition of a present.
Since the first time we showed the game I'd been considering making some sort of battlemode. People loved messing around and bopping each other on the head but the thought of a whole other game mode just for that didn't seem worthwhile to me. It felt too tacked on.

The present brings a capture the flag type feeling to the race. Players want to be the pode to bring the gift to the party so naturally whenever possible they'll try to steal it from their competitors. This allows for a pretty unique wrestle race where players have to decide if they want the present or if they want to maintain their lead.

There is a problem with this though that we haven't quite figure out. Who should win? Right now the party room can be entered by anyone, but you don't necessarily have to be holding the present to be first in the race.
We've considered giving points to players based on who entered the room in what position, who brought the present, etc. as well as only allowing the door to the party room to be opened by the player with the present, but neither of these feel quite right yet. It's gonna take some more thinking because the present is just too fun to try and steal and there's no way we're getting rid of it now!
Suggestions as always are welcome!

As well as this we've also added a bunch of new plants, some rooms, re-worked some traps and with that we've decided to call our current build the official alpha.

I took this build to Beer and Pixels last Tuesday night and had a great time. We'd taken the game there last month and had a lot of great suggestions for how to make the game better or more interesting. It was cool to see some of the same people there again to try it out this time. We had an overall really positive response to the game with even more suggestions that I can't wait to get working on. People played a lot longer this time and it was really fun watching everyone battle over the present and throw their arms up in frustration whenever it was stolen from them. Can't wait to bring it back next month!

So with that, it's now full steam ahead (No pun intended) on getting this thing up on Greenlight!

Wow those renders look incredible man, looking forward to just looking around these places.

[Art for the unartistic]

Art for the unartistic

So, we're getting to the stage in this game where we want to pretty it up, you might have seen in some of Niall's previous posts and also on our Twitter that we've been putting in some plants and other fancy bits and pieces.
Now, art doesn't come naturally to me at all. I know what looks good and can picture it in my head but getting it down either on paper or digitally is a major challenge and one that I actually find quite frustrating.
Thankfully for the purpose of this game I've found a neat little trick to get around this. This technique actually developed out of the process used to put drawovers on our rooms and although it's a bit convoluted it's allowed me to get assets into the game without feeling like I am drawing them at all.
The workflow is something like this:

-Draw a super rough sketch of the basic shapes I want

-Create this shape out of simple geometry

-Draw straight lines over the whole object

-Manipulate the lines creating curves until the shape is just about where I want it

-Fill in the lines with greys/whites/gradients to be tinted in game depending on whatever colour palette Niall's magic code has created.

And ta-da! We've got ourselves some art!
Here's a collection of some of the decorative plants made using this technique, I think they've come out pretty nice.

As well as these little things I've also been working on a bunch more levels. I'm hoping to create enough rooms that it's actually an acheivement to see them all. Right now we're sitting at about 34 individual rooms, each with their own micro-procgens for trap and plant placement and it's already feeling really fresh with every play, which is good, but I'm personally not going to be happy until we've at LEAST quadripled that number of rooms.

The great thing about having all the rooms link up into one long graphic is that they really start to blend into each other gameplay wise. Sometimes I catch myself thinking "Wow I don't remember making this room at all" only to find that I'm standing inbetween two rooms so here's hoping an untrained eye sprinting through levels at top octospeed will never notice rooms at all.

Well that's about all from me today, we'll have an alpha build up and running real soon so if anyone is interested in giving it a try just comment here and we'll make sure to keep you in the loop, thanks guys!

Best of luck to you guys, this kickstarter is looking promising!

Thanks a lot guys, really glad you're enjoying the posts!
We're in a bit of a crunch mode at the moment trying to get an alpha build ready to get us another step closer to a Greenlight campaign (More details on that soon!)
In the mean time take a peek at some level runs I've been testing out to make sure all the room graphics blend together nicely. A few little touch ups need to be done here and there but I'm happy with the progress!

Totally loving the visual style of this game and the gameplay looks really fun and challenging already, keeping an eye on this one!

Hey everyone, thanks for the kind words about the devlog!
As Niall mentioned we have recently been trying to show the game around small local conventions/indie dev meet ups and the reaction has been both really fun and super eye opening! We've been working hard to try and keep the game as easy to pick up as possible while still allowing you to develop skills that can get you ahead.
We've found it generally takes people 1 full playthrough of a race to really get the hang of the controls and be able to properly race without having to think too much about what button to press and when. With such a small control set it really allowed players to get into the game quickly, which is exactly what we were aiming for.

One issue we saw a lot was that because most of the rooms are designed around moving one direction the game can become sort of button mashy. While we feel this isn't necessarily a huge problem for a party game like this we kind of wanted players to try to find the more advantageous routes in the rooms and make better use of traps to help them get ahead instead of just running along hoping the person infront of you messes up somewhere.
The first thing we tried was to remove a few mechanics we had added to traps. Switches now no longer require a slam to activate them and will trigger simply when players run over them. Seed shooters also don't need another player to run over them first meaning they can be fired by anyone. We're hoping that by taking restrictions off the traps/interactable elements it opens up the game a little more and makes it a more interesting environment to play in.
Another thing we noticed when watching people play was that straight rooms were REALLY boring. Because everyone's top speed is the same, whoever enters the straight first, leaves first. It completely takes away any gameplay and you're basically stuck where you were over the whole room. Straight run rooms were originally incorporated into the game because it felt almost too intense to constantly have obstacles and we wanted to give the players some breathing space.

Our current solution to this is the previously mentioned dash mechanic. Having the dash allows us to have the easy terrain of straight runs while still giving players the opportunity to overtake their competitors. It also caters to another playstyle we saw when playtesting,wrestling!
We found that almost everyone who played the game had a few races, got the feel of the game and then wanted to stay in one room, bop each others heads and roll around. Playing around like this is too fun and we're really happy with how the dash mechanic allows for this sort of play while still racing. It's also got us thinking about potentially having a wrestling playmode with battlerooms but we'll see how that goes later!
Playtesting also revealed a few other small things that help with keeping the game fair. Our respawn mechanic used to try and respawn the first player to go off screen and would keep trying to respawn them before anyone else. We've now changed this so that it cycles through players that are no longer in the race meaning that friends can either save certain people or purposefully avoid them if they want to be really mean.

Alright, time to get back to making this game beautiful!

Puddledash


@islipaway That motorcycling looks hella cool.

Is it normal for your eyes to fall out while working on things like this?
The crunch for Gamefest is real!

Thanks guys, glad you're enjoying the tech/design posts 'cause here comes another one!


Iterations of rooms for different design stages

Without thinking much about the process of actually implementing rooms into the game I naively assumed we could string any rooms together just by attaching start and end points. Although when we started to implement procedural level gen it didn't quite work that way. Levels were constantly overlapping each other and cohesive gameplay was impossible to guarantee. Looking at the time limit we've set ourselves to get a working build for Gamefest, we decided to stay away from trying to get this to work as it was just too messy with too many variables to factor in.

In order to create reliable and predictable levels within the system we'd already created we needed to specify a few rules for level generation.
Firstly, we needed to have rooms with standardized sizes. These rooms can then be used as the grid for the self avoiding walk to navigate through.
Secondly, rooms needed to have start and end points that could always stitch themselves together within jumping height of each other. This ensured that any room could spawn anywhere after any other room and still create playable areas.
Lastly, we already knew that constantly changing directions was not fun and broke flow so we needed to work on rooms that made it as smooth as possible to change directions.

These new rules lead way to discovering a lot of problems with our level gen and how we were trying to approach room placement. Stitching rooms together through standardised start and end points was good, but placing up or  down travelling paths cut off the next rooms.
In order to counteract this we created the corner case tile. We placed these corner cases at the tops and bottoms of all up and down tiles. This gave us an extra transition tile to take us from horizontal movement into vertical movement.

The immediate problem with this solution was that it pushed our grid all over the place, again we were faced with gaps and overlaps.

To counter this we tried to approach transitional tiles in a different manner. We found that most of the problems were caused on the ins and outs of up tiles, so we implemented 2 solutions. If the upward slope was to continue in the same horizontal direction we create 2 up rooms, one to transition between the horizontal tile before it and one to transition into the horizontal tile after it.

If the upward slope changed horizontal directions afterwards, we implement a bounce pad that shot you onto the next horizontal tile.

I'm sure you can see the issue with this solution!

After a few hours and about 4 full pages of frustrated scribbling we finally came up with a solution. Instead of adding or shifting tiles to make the paths work we came up with tiles that worked completely within what was generated by the walker script. This seemed so obvious once implemented but for some reason it took us a long while to get there!

To make this work we changed the level generator to ensure we always spawn a minimum of two horizontal rooms between vertical rooms. After this we converted the horizontal rooms that were directly before and after the vertical rooms into transitional rooms. In the code they are still considered left or right facing rooms but when you play on them they appear to be up or down travelling rooms.

Thinking of levels in terms of start and end points and not as individual rooms helped a lot in finding a tileset that worked for our moveset. Thinking this way removed the clutter of what was in the rooms and focused in on the actual path travelled and the critical points that made that work. This let us figure out the basic shapes needed to be able to actually traverse through these points and along the paths.

The next step is to expand on these basic shapes and room types and make some fun situations inbetween them!

Thank you all very much, we aim to make the gummiest, hattiest game of 2016!

Let's talk about level design!
One of the major design points we had when coming into this game was the ability to slow down the leaders of the pack without anyone being frustrated. We wanted to approach it in a way that would make people feel bested but not beaten. Tight races feel really fun and being able to potentially take the lead at any point keeps the game exciting.


Originally the game was focused almost solely on getting ahead via the use of traps that slowed players in front of you and as a result I found myself coming up with a lot of unavoidable traps that just didn't feel fun. I wanted players to always have the opportunity to avoid dangerous situations if they played smart and looked ahead.


With this in mind we came up with 3 trap mechanics targeted at helping players at the back of the pack.
-Flatgrass
   Grows in areas that are either unavoidable or give a significant speed boost to the player. Flat grass slows the first player that runs through it but then flattens to the ground allowing others to pass through with ease.
This forces leading players to either take a hit to their speed or choose a less favourable route.
-Seedshooters
   Dangerous in tight spaces, seedshooters are activated by the octopodes. Once enough have trampled on them they shoot a seed that bounces itself along the level, knocking down anything in its way. Fortunately the seeds are quite small and can be avoided with a well timed leap in the right direction.
-Flip/timer switches
   Switches activate swinging/rotating platforms in the level, these tiles may offer faster routes for those who flip them or may force a player further ahead through a tougher area. Players still gotta be careful - if used to re-direct someone else they may also have to take the same route.

Some flatgrass in action

Along with these 3 traps we've also implemented a fun attack - slamming! The slam can be activated while in the air, it causes the player to shoot towards the ground at high speeds, potentially knocking out anyone underneath. It also has the added bonus of shooting you along curves if you time it just right.

With the traps and how they work clear it was much easier to come up with what I thought were some great levels. Unfortunately I later found out was not at all the case!

Not so great level design

Although the traps worked really well, kept the pack quite tight and the races exciting there were a lot of issues with the way the octopodes actually moved around the level. We quickly found that obstacles that changed direction or that required any sort of wall jump style movement were at best frustrating and at worst completely unfair.

The moveset we have is best designed for downward movement, but we ain't making Downwell!

Muddledown

We had to think a lot about the way to approach obstacles. It's pretty straightforward to design for a single player, but taking advantage of and exploiting multiplayer takes a lot of experimentation to strike the balance between playability and intrigue.

Hitting curves and getting a good flow going was great, and being able to break someone elses stride felt really rewarding. Because of this, levels with multiple high and lowground routes worked great. Fortunately we'd had some tiles made up from an old game we worked on that suited this need perfectly.

Nice curves gurl

Alternate routes

Tiles!

Just missing a ramp or getting hit off your path is now all part of the fun and you know that you'll have every opportunity to hit someone with a revenge slam and get ahead again!